The structures of identity tend to disappear whenever individuals are flung to the radical outside of the world (beyond the social, the political, the cultural). Moreover, this evisceration of self (where the old “I” burns away) is only magnified when one adds the variable of fatal struggle to the realm of experience. Thus an all-women unit leaves behind its insular community in order to challenge a rising enemy far beyond their midst. Their lives have been threatened; a mercenary formation to the East has already condemned their people to certain death, and marches nearer with each day; thus stationed at the crossroads of emergency, they find that they must kill or perish now. This part is simple enough—i.e. the nature of their immediate task—but the more complex question that remains is: Will they still be themselves once having traversed the Uneven and the Open on the way to battle? Or is their departure from home the first step to a dramatic trespass and reinvention? These women fighters cannot help but be transformed at such a distance from their memories and city walls; rather, this new terrain of exteriority—that of the desert, hills, or jungle—is an experience of immensity and borderlessness for which no prior subjectivity can remain. The old self will not survive the extreme temperatures of this remoteness, and so they will begin to formulate new definitions, profiles, appearances, and even names as they sit together in the dark and bleed together by the light. They will compose new anthems and initiate a poetic language that only they understand; this is the basic right of their lethal intimacy. Hence even those who return will never fully return, and the better for it (an existential revolution to match their practical revolution). They will come back irreversibly transfigured and evolved, wounded and altered, powerful in unforeseen ways, more expansive in their vision, more dangerous and capable for what they have endured in the places no one goes. They will come back as a band of strangers/foreigners to the very ones who they were sent out to protect. War is pure metamorphosis, nothing less.